Last Saturday I decided to seek refuge from the bitter cold in the Tate Modern. I love visiting galleries as I enjoy many forms of art; sculpture, architecture, portrait, abstract, installations etc. In short, I am open minded to all methods of creativity and expression. I haven’t been to the Tate Modern for years so I was dubious because I know what can pass for art these days. Here are some examples of pieces that had people crowding around, staring, analysing and debating…. Captivating Genius Inspiring  Mona who? Stunning (my favourite) I’m not going to go on about this because you can probably sense my prickly sarcasm already and I have spoken about my hatred for pretentious art in a previous post , but come on! You can either be drawn into it, which many people were, or can you see things for what they are and laugh. I love abstract art and subliminal messages as much as the next person, but don’t paint a blue square and tell me it’s about the s...

Charlie Brooker’s exceptional ‘Be Right Back’, the first episode in the new ‘Black Mirror’ series, aired last night. If you haven’t watched it yet, I suggest you do . Ash and Martha are a normal couple; one minute laughing, next minute arguing, rounding off with some below average sex. She is an illustrator working on a large interactive touch screen, and his head is always in his phone; tweeting, posting videos, updating statuses – nothing unusual there. When Ash dies, Martha is beyond devastated, and worsens when she finds out she is pregnant. Her friend signs her up for some sort of online grievance programme which collects all social media and online interaction of the deceased and combines it to mimic that person via instant messenger. ‘ Hi it’s Ash’ , is the first pop up message on Martha’s screen, and quite rightly she freaks the fuck out. Her overwhelming grief makes it too hard to resist; she talks back to him. It's therapeutic, but she wants more. " The more it...

Usually my friends tell me exactly what they want for their birthdays. After a few years it got a bit boring; no element of surprise or excitement, no childlike joy. So a year ago, my friend had asked for Ray-Bans. I pretended we were not getting her Ray-Bans and we were in fact getting her a swan. Obviously this was a really lame joke but I thought I should at least follow through in a way, so I wrapped her Ray-Bans up to look like a swan. This turned out to be quite amusing and brought a bit of fun to the predictable present opening. So I continued.... Make up and creams in a baby for my pregnant friend   Perfume in a wine bottle   A sat nav in a giant cupcake

I can just about feign interest in the football matches of my own country, let alone America's version of the sport. However, I'm known to succumb to a little Super Bowl spirit by way of eating fried stuff with cheese on the Sunday, then after a good 8 hours sleep I YouTube the half time performance and the ads. No one can say I don't care about the Super Bowl. Now, you can probably tell from this post's title what I thought of the ads that were shown during the match. They weren't awful really... just thought they were pretty average. A 30 second ad shown at the Super Bowl will cost the brand a cool $4million; so forgive me for thinking they would knock my socks off, but these ads could have been shown during the break of Corrie and I wouldn't have known the difference. I won't go through them all, there are  plenty of other writers  who have got there before me making higher standard jokes and put downs, but I will go through some I like and dislik...